In the critical matrix of race, class, gender, and sexuality, class is
the category most often quietly left out. Class is an embarrassment from
every angle and perspective—to inherit wealth is a crime against
meritocracy, but even the working class, Marx’s supposed protagonist of
history, has dispersed among the sad strip malls of our postindustrial
landscape. We lack a useful political language to describe class
hierarchy: liberal centrists view class identity as only a temporary
position that exists to be transcended in the glorious process of upward
mobility, and Left cultural theorists avoid it because, frankly, class
struggle hasn’t been all that glamorous over the last 80 years or so.
Class critique lacks the oppositional moral clarity of racial oppression
and the civil rights movement, the clear international majority position
of the women’s struggle, or the apotheosis of individual desire in the
butterfly-emergence of the “coming out” story. Even more confusingly,
sometimes the people in the lower classes who might stand to benefit the
most from class analysis are the most strongly invested in avoiding the
rhetoric of class and worshipping the wealthy (see for example Bruce
Robbins’s analysis in Upward Mobility and the Common
Good
of Carolyn Steedman’s memoir of the Tory working class.)

Given the empty slipperiness of the language of social class, theorists
are turning instead to the policy-wonk language of statistics, which
offers some distinct advantages. When you compare the privileges of the
wealthy 1% to the slow downward mobility of the 99%, the unfairness of
capital concentration and the threat to the creed of liberal equality is
patently clear. But the language of statistics doesn’t help us
understand the character of the new class that is benefitting from the
second rise of capitalism. Will it flaunt its wealth or disguise it?
Thomas Piketty’s warning in Capital in the Twenty-First
Century
of a return of the dominance of inherited capital is a cogent economic
story, but to express what it means to live in an unequal capitalist
society, he has to turn to the past, to the traditional strivers in
Austen and Balzac novels.

Many Marxist histories (think of Eric
Hobsbawm
or E.P.
Thompson)
approach the problem of class by trying to pin down the shifting
identity and allegiances of the working class. In his brief, compelling
volume The Bourgeois, by contrast, Franco Moretti focuses on the class
that supposedly has come to rule the modern era—the capital-owning
bourgeoisie. What he finds is a class that begins by denying its
existence as a class, and ends by staging its disappearance into an
existential problem of modernity. “Capitalism is more powerful than
ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished,” he posits.1
(Perhaps this is an overstatement: I suspect there are still plenty of
good citizens who consciously subscribe to values of the historical
bourgeoisie, especially in Midwestern country clubs.) The term
“bourgeois” is both central to social history and oddly evanescent.
Unlike the aristocracy with its ranks and hierarchies, the bourgeoisie
is distinguished by its social “permeability”2 and openness, its
identification with the individual virtues of frugality and hard work,
and its uneasy negotiation between the greedy aspects of capitalism and
imperialism and the insistence on personal responsibility. When we
replace the word “bourgeois” with the term “middle class,” things get
even fuzzier. Moretti suggests that the term “middle class” may have
arisen because of a desire in Victorian Britain that there be a class to
fix the problem of what Disraeli called the “Two nations—the rich and
the poor” that threatened to rip the country apart in the 1840s.3 But
then the term “middle class” takes on a second, occluding function,
“shielding [bourgeois power] from direct criticism” behind a false
vision of social balance.4

To this important and yet amorphous task, Moretti brings some unique
critical resources. There is no other American critic writing today
(with the exception of Fredric
Jameson)
who can command his breathtaking international range or his willingness
to make large theoretical interventions. Moretti is a true member of
that vanishing breed, the critic of comparative literature. His
methodology is flexible, combining narratology and the history of genre,
Marxist historiography, and statistical readings of archives made
possible by new digital search techniques. Moretti invented the term
“distant reading” and helped build the Stanford Literary
Lab, whose members he credits with some of
the archival patterns he analyzes. Moretti’s use of the work done by
Literary Lab foregrounds a collaboration that’s often left unspoken in
critical work—the relation between the critical star and the labor of
grad students and researchers. Thus the book is a personal tour de
force, a return to Moretti’s own long-standing interests in geography
and social class, and a demonstration piece of the kind of humanist
inquiry that can be facilitated, at least a little, by historically
trained researchers engaging in what he calls “grammatical
pars[ing]”5 and others call (somewhat appallingly) “text mining.”

The linguistic “distant reading” patterns Moretti focuses on in this
book are not just long historical trends. They are also visible on the
level of single words in texts—especially, in this book, the use of
gerunds and adjectives in literary sources. While Moretti mostly draws
on traditional intellectual histories in his readings, he also cites the
Literary Lab’s number-crunching to suggest, for instance, that Defoe’sRobinson Crusoe uses an “extremely rare verb form”,6 the past
gerund (“having secured…”) more than other novels;7 and that
Pilgrim’s Progress uses the word “things” as much as 10 times more
than other books in his corpus.8 Yet his arguments ultimately rely
more on stylistic analysis than on quantitative data. In that ur-text of
bourgeois individualism, Robinson
Crusoe,
he posits the persistence of the verb structure “past gerund; past
tense; infinitive” (as in “having stowed my boat very safe, I went
on shore to look about me…”) creates a “rhythm of continuity”9 that
reinscribes daily activity without examining the ultimate goal of that
activity. The goal here is to show how a literary style—even a style
that resolves itself apparently into a lack of style, into pure
efficiency or usefulness, can create a whole mindset that has the power
to resolve or suspend social contradictions. Out of this prose style
comes the habit of a bourgeois “culture”—an equally ephemeral word, to
describe an ephemeral concept, and yet one that, in conjuring up the
illusion of self-evident solidity, has real social effects. Moretti’s
analysis of class through the vector of literary style is thus not
primarily a sociological or economic inquiry, or even a history of a
single national culture—and thus it captures something those methods
cannot.

Moretti’s further chapters analyze moments in nineteenth-century prose
that he sees as signs of a typically-bourgeois struggle between
celebrating individual acquisition and wanting to soften or veil social
conflict. He reads Goethe and Flaubert in terms of what he calls
“fillers”—those long passages in which nothing seems to happen, which
he calls “the only narrative invention of the entire century”, through
which the world is rationalized and cleansed of miracles.10 He
addresses the controversy about the rise of free indirect discourse—is
it a sign of amoral freedom from the conventional, or the spread of
panoptic surveillance?—and suggests that the evolution of the novel
away from didacticism might have the paradoxical effect of leaving it
“impoten[t]” and paralyzed as it drifts toward entropy.11 “The
bourgeois vanishing at the moment of capitalism’s triumph”12—might
both the novel and the bourgeois class have outlived the social
conditions that gave rise to them? Moretti sees the British Victorian
stress on “earnestness” and “honesty” as the first modern moment of
cultural hegemony, a “specifically British answer to a common European
problematic”.13 Stressing earnestness (rather than, say, fairness) is
a way of asserting that “the objective results of an action are less
important than the spirit with which it is done,” thus “preserving the
fundamental tonality of bourgeois existence … while endowing it with a
sentimental-ethical significance.”14 The ultimate end is the
construction of a concept of “Useful knowledge, or: knowledge without
freedom”15—a goal that will be instantly recognizable to anyone
wondering why, for instance, Scott Walker would put so much energy into
undermining the University of
Wisconsin.

The volume ends suggestively with two alternate teleologies. One depicts
uneven developments in novels from Italy, Spain, Poland, and Russia, in
which the new bourgeois spirit is not victorious, but rather crushed by
the persistence of the old regime. And in the final chapter, an analysis
of Ibsen’s plays, the bourgeoisie destroys itself. Ibsen’s capitalist
strivers inhabit a world so full of gray zones and ambiguity that it is
not “morally legible.”16 In Ibsen’s plays, Moretti argues, the
realistic hard-working bourgeois epitomized by Robinson Crusoe is
symbolically displaced by a Nietzschean “creative destroyer.”17

Moretti’s story of the rise and fall of this dominant culture of prose
and striving honesty unsurprisingly leaves many questions unanswered.
Since capitalism appears still to be intact, was bourgeois culture
merely a birth stage that has been superseded by shameless exploitation,
and is capitalism now doomed to collapse without that regulatory desire
for social harmony? Economically, was there really a stage in which
“honest” accumulation preceded creative destruction, or did a predatory
primitive accumulation give rise to a more stable financialization (as
in Arrighi’s “systemic cycles of
accumulation”
shifting over centuries from the Netherlands to England and then the
United States) or are both moments still going on simultaneously? From
our own perspective, will the bourgeois “creation of a culture of
work”—“the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a
class”18 become increasingly irrelevant in an age of automation that
threatens mass structural unemployment? Moretti’s work is a superb and
provocative reflection on these problems: while its historical
conclusions may or may not prepare us for the analysis of new class
structures in the 21st century, its recognition of the elusive nature of
bourgeois culture is surely a warning of how difficult that next task
will be.

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